Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast (review)

Jan Hoffman French weaves together a rich ethnographic account of ethnic, racial, and legal identities in Northeastern Brazil to produce a complex chronicle of two neighboring communities. A study of the Xocó, who claim indigenous descent, and the Mocambo, who claim African descent, unearths each population’s struggle for social justice, lands rights, and legal recognition of their identities. Compelling testimony from these two communities, combined with French’s insightful reflection on the interplay between ethnoracial identity and legal endorsements, results in a critical revelation of how individuals and communities shape law and identity.

The struggle for land among the dispossessed in Brazil’s northeast is intimately tied to the status of protection imparted by the state. Policy enacted by colonial and nineteenth-century authorities afforded a small oligarchy with an abundance of land until the legislation of the past few decades provided protection for groups with the legal status of “Indian.” The Xocó actively claimed land, and with support of the Catholic Church, “legalized” their identity as Indians. French argues that the 1973 Indian Statute and legal tradition in Brazil resulted in an “ethnic identification of indigenous Brazilians [that] came to be seen as flexible and contextual” (69). Despite physical appearances that would suggest blackness, the Xocó continue to forge an “indian” identity. In contrast, the quilombo clause of 1988 granted protection to survivors of quilombos and resulted in a significant increase of recognized quilombos. According to French, the Mocambo identity was born out of tension due to land reserves granted to the Xocó, and eventually resulted in a shift from an identity based on race, to one that privileges ethnicity.

French’s work builds on previous scholarship in a number of ways. Scholars in the 1980s tended to focus on class as a primary marker in examinations of social conflict and inequality. Subsequent studies of ethnic plurality and multi-culturalism in Latin America treated descendents of Africans and the Indigenous separately, due to a scholarly tendency to equate “black” with a racial identity, and “Indian” with an ethnic identity. French departs from more recent studies, such as Jonathan Warren’s Racial Revolutions (2001), which argues that utilizing racial—rather than ethnic—discourse resulted in political advantages for Indians in Eastern Brazil. Legalizing Identities affirms that discourses of race and ethnicity differ substantially in Brazil, where identity can be “Indian” or “Black” or both. According to French, the choice to belong to one or multiple categories can result in political empowerment.

French’s monograph is a holistic study of local “ethnogenesis” in Northeastern Brazil that skillfully integrates the legal intricacies and implications of self-definition. A complex examination of the interplay between racial and ethnic self-definition the legalization of those identities, the text challenges previous assumptions by non-Brazilian academics about the place of ethnoracial identity in Brazil as it relates to political action. French questions previous assertions that political identities are exclusively defined by race; rather, in Brazil political alliances and activism more often delineate racial labels. The state acts as an author of emerging identities, but Brazil’s weak state results in a system in which non-governmental actors play essential roles. Laws differ in interpretation according to the participation and interpretation of the group applying the law (Xocó or Mocambo); its meanings are debatable, shifting, and can be transformative.

This monograph will serve undergraduate and graduate classes alike. A multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the roles of race and color in political mobilization, the conceptualization behind Legalizing Identities provides a complex lens for students at the graduate level. Moreover, the study of two communities in Northeastern Brazil underscores the importance of cross-cultural comparisons of ethnoracial discourse and legal identities in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, French explains more basic differences in governance and governmentality in Brazil and their relation to ethnoracial categories, making it a suitable text for upper-level undergraduate students.